U.S. Pat. No. 5,438,570 describes service observing equipment for use with the Signaling System Seven (“SS#7”) Telephone Networks. Service observing equipment provides means for monitoring a switching network in order to determine the quality of service, billing verification and validation that is being given to the subscribers served by that network. The end product of the service observation equipment is “Call Records”, “Report Summaries” and “Graphic Displays” relating to things about the network such as: how many calls went through which equipment, the called, calling and charge numbers, the length of time required to perform the various call functions, the billing duration, the number and type of call failures, the location of congestion, flagrant dispositions, missing messages, calls of an excessive duration, premature cut offs, peak and overall link loading, and the like. From this information, the telephone operating company may acquire many advantages ranging from reports on routine maintenance, instant maintenance, planning future expansion, justifying billings and rate hikes, selling additional services, detection and prevention of fraud and the like.
Patent application Ser. No. 09/098,045 filed Jun. 16, 1998 further advances the technology of U.S. Pat. No. 5,438,570 by generating interim call detail records from the SS#7 data stream while the call is “in-progress”. Instead of waiting until the call is terminated, the advance is responsive to various triggers occurring during a call, thereby enabling the user to perform “in-progress” fraud detection and prevention, “real-time” pre-paid billable audits, plus “instantaneous” Investigation of maintenance problems.
This invention applies a similar technology to corresponding networks of high speed data links. More particularly, the network being monitored has a number of high speed, synchronous data links extending between switching transfer points (“STP”) which enable switching points or end offices (“SP”) to communicate directly with each other, via special protocols. The data link network is independent of voice or other communication paths normally used by the telephone type of network.
Historically, the surveillance and maintenance of an STP's or SP's have been performed with protocol analyzers. These devices monitor multiple links in order to individually decode and store all encountered message signal units (MSU) for selectively displaying their contents. Traps may be pre-configured to capture MSU's either in real-time or from storage, but they are un-correlated.
A “transaction” is an enquiry addressed to a data base related to a call which is being set up by the SS#7 system. For example, the “transaction” might be caused by receipt of an “800” number. The SS#7 system asks the data base for routing information (the number of the line paying for the “800” call) and then forwards the call according to the routing information that it receives. There are many other transactions.
If the user already knows what he is looking for and he must laboriously and manually search through millions of stored MSU's in order to find those MSU's associated with a specific call set up or the system must make a query transaction before an analysis of an “entire” call can be performed. In many instances where there is limited storage capacity, the MSU's at the end or beginning of long-duration calls will be “lost” thus making a thorough analysis of completed call set ups impossible.
The embodied invention automatically correlates all MSU's monitored at Switching Transfer Points in real-time into a “memory data block”representing an entire call set up or query transaction before displaying or storing for processing it thereby eliminating the need for labor intensive manual correlation. Each block is assigned a final disposition category so its retention can be pre-filtered to retain only desired data. In this manner, one need not know what he is looking for ahead of time and many more “relevant” MSU's may be stored, pre-correlated for instant analysis in the same storage capacity. This procedure also eliminates the loss of both the beginning and the end MSU data because of limited storage.
The inventive concept provides more efficient operations, but is not limited to the operations described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,438,570 and patent application Ser. No. 09/098,045. It is related to the Signaling System #7 protocol (without voice) and works at the signal transfer points (STP) as well as signaling points (SP). The term “Dump 7” is a trademark for an output format of an entire data block for performing a more comprehensive and faster protocol analysis of calls or queries.
The calling office assembles certain required control, monitoring, and supervision information into data packets, each of which is identified by its own address assigned on a per call basis. The data packet also contains identifications of calling and called subscribers, types of calls, equipment, and other pertinent information relating to the call routing identified by the packet address or “routing label”.
The observation equipment has a plurality of memory locations (data blocks) each being capable of storing data relative to a given data packet. For the duration of a call, these locations are assigned individual addresses corresponding to the pertinent data packet address. As the data packets are transmitted along the high speed data links, the service observation equipment decodes those packets having an address of interest and stores the decoded information in a pertinent one of the memory locations identified by the call's address which might consist of a link out, point code and circuit identification code.
After the receipt of the data packet indicating that a call has terminated, the data stored in the pertinent memory location are read out to make appropriate “Service Observation Reports” and/or “Call Records”, for that call. The data may also be stored in a secondary memory for further or future report processing. Then, the memory location is emptied and reassigned to accumulate data relative to a new packet address.
After the call is terminated, the “Call Records” and “Summary Reports” are invaluable tools for giving a better grade of network service for performing fraud detection, billing, or the like. However, they are after-the-fact tools and do little or nothing to correct problems, especially of preventing crimes, while they are occurring. For example, if a person has a poor credit rating, heretofore, the only options have been either to suspend his network service or to allow his calls to go through.
A moment's thought will bring to mind many situations where it would be desirable for the operating company to take suitable action while the call is in progress. For example, calls from an area frequented by drug dealers, criminals, and the like, may require different forms of action depending upon a profile of calls which are made by such people. Other services which may be provided by the inventive system are:                Process SS#7 data from mated STP's links to trap and report on “Hot” calling or called numbers in real-time so independent audio surveillance may be performed while the call is in-progress.        Process SS#7 data from mated STP's links to threshold long duration calls while in-progress for analysis and premature cutoff due to lack of credit scenarios.        Process SS#7 data from mated STP's links to threshold multiple calls in-progress from the same credit card for analysis and premature cutoff due to circumstances of stolen credit cards.        Process SS#7 data from mated STP's links and trap on called numbers in real-time, specifically while the call is set up, to trace the various routes the switching network assigns as a possible source of error.        Process SS#7 data from mated STP's link's to classify calls into disposition categories such as busy, don't answer, no answer messages, switch blockage etc. to zero in on Equipment Blockages and Failures in real-time and generate quality assurance statistical reports.        Process SS#7 data from mated STP's links in real-time to produce data blocks of correlated call messages in a decoded Dump 7 format for instant protocol analysis of network failures.        Process SS#7 data from mated STP's links to produce more comprehensive custom call detail records for billing subscribers for new advanced intelligent network features and validating other billing sources.        Processing SS#7 data from mated STP's links to more accurately calculate minutes of usage between switching network's and including “incompleted” call minutes to more favorably negotiate reciprocal billing arrrangements.        Process SS#7 data from mated STP's links to correlate messages into data blocks with a GPS time stamp to more accurately calculate holding times on various routes for better traffic engineering and eliminating network congestion.        Process SS#7 data from mated STP's links to generate real-time link syncronization, occupancy and error graphics analysis and for centralized real-time alarming of exceeded thresholds.        Processing SS#7 data from mated STP's links to count message traffic in real-time and alarm mass call set ups which create looping congestion plus investigate network message distribution.        Processing SS#7 data from mated STP's links to provide a message count by protocol between originating pointcode and destination pointcode for performing usage measurement billing, verification and validation.        Process SS#7 data from mated STP's links to correlate into CDR's for custom filtration, formatting and transmission to a variety of host RDBMS computer applications over a WAN.        Process SS#7 data from mated STP's links into custom statistical reports for scheduled transmission to variety of host computer applications over a WAN.        Processing SS#7 data from mated STP's links in real-time into interim, thresholded, custom filtered and formatted ZIP records for transmission over a WAN to a variety of in-progress computer applications.        Processing SS#7 data from mated STP's links in order to to function over a Wide Area Network as centralized source of user customized SS#7 data.        Processing SS#7 data from mated STP's links in order to function over a Wide Area Network as a centralized source of real-time graphics for visually analyzing the performance of the SS#7 Network.        